Re: [MACTCL] Carbon Dater Report on Tcl/Tk

[Jim I. <ji...@ap...>]

Guys,

It was definitely more than a three week job.  I have been hacking on 
this for most of this year, with some help.  We are almost done with 
something folks can start hacking on to clean up the remaining bugs.  I 
just have to find a week to fix up the core event handling - we used 
kind of a skanky hack to reuse the Unix Tcl code for Tk, and that is 
proving unsustainable.

The one thing that I did different from your suggestion was that I did 
not just Carbonize MacTk, I forked the tree, and are doing a MacOS X 
only port.  I decided to do this before I started (after a lengthy 
discussion on this list).  I want to be free to take advantage of 
whatever cool stuff there is on MacOS X.  One instance of this, which I 
have not done yet, but is in the plans, is to replace the QuickDraw 
drawing with Quartz.  The Quartz drawing model is much more flexible, 
and also more like the X11 and Windows models.  We can kill off a whole 
bunch of drawing bugs in the Canvas with this...  And as time goes on, 
there will be more & more stuff in this category...

I don't know yet just when I can release something, but it should be 
soon now.

Thanks for your patience.

Jim


On Monday, August 20, 2001, at 02:27 AM, Jack Jansen wrote:

> I think "a few weekends" is probably overly optimistic for carbonizing 
> tcl/tk,
> but it shouldn't be too difficult.
>
> Just in case you're going to do this I'll give you some advice based on 
> my
> experience carbonizing MacPython, feel free to ask for more info.
>
> - portable software (like tcl or python) is a lot easier to carbonize 
> than
> average software, because the dependencies tend to be localized.
>
> - don't start with the easy bits, but start with looking at potential
> showstoppers. For MacPython this was the underlying GUSI I/O system, 
> which
> used all asynchronous calls in a way that wasn't supported on Carbon. I 
> had to
> wait for someone to port GUSI (at least partially) before I was able to
> proceed. Oh yes: the showstoppers will probably be in third-party 
> libraries:-(
> Although in the case of tcl I think MoreFiles is the only one used, and 
> that
> is available carbonized.
>
> - Follow the order in Apple's Carbon Porting Guide. Especially the 
> accessor
> stuff should be done early and globally (I didn't:-) as that keeps your
> program working under classic but allows you to do the bulk of the work
> (getting rid of lomem access and direct window/dialog/etc structure 
> access).
> --
> Jack Jansen             | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia 
> Abu-Jamal ++++
> Jac...@or... | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your 
> sig ++++
> www.oratrix.nl/~jack    | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-
> l/sigaction.htm
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tcl-mac mailing list
> Tc...@li...
> http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tcl-mac

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Jim Ingham                                                           
ji...@ap...
Developer Tools - gdb